by Xu Xu
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Unlike the fictional protagonist in “Bird Talk,” Xu Xu arrived in Hong Kong as a literary celebrity. According to Murong Yujun, Xu Xu’s readers would frequently track him down at the Gloucester Café in Causeway Bay, clasping copies of his books and asking him for a signature (Murong 2003, 15). Xu Xu had been one of the most popular writers of the Republican period. He had shot to stardom in prewar Shanghai with exotic romances such as “Goddess of the Arabian Sea” 阿拉伯海的女神 (1936) and “Ghost Love” 鬼戀 (1937), stories in which confident and modern urban first-person narrators fall in love with mysterious women who invariably challenge the narrator’s professed rationality.
Many of these were at least in part inspired by Xu Xu’s sojourn in Europe. Xu Xu had embarked on study abroad in Paris in 1936 but had returned to Shanghai after the outbreak of war with Japan the following year. Xu Xu eventually left Shanghai in 1942, not long after the foreign concessions had been occupied by Japan, and relocated to Chongqing, the Nationalist government’s wartime capital. In Chongqing, Xu Xu’s epic spy-romance The Rustling Wind 風蕭蕭 (1942), set in occupied Shanghai, was serialized to great acclaim in the wartime paper Eradicator Daily 掃蕩報. Xu Xu briefly returned to Shanghai in 1946 and with the help of Liu Yichang 劉以鬯 (1918−2018) began to publish his wartime works, many of which had previously only appeared in journals or newspapers (Liu 2002a, 208). These books met with great success: The Rustling Wind went through three printruns in less than a year and “Ghost Love” through nineteen by the end of 1949.2
Yet while the reading public was fond of Xu Xu’s exotic first-person narratives that frequently challenged conventional perceptions of reality, the leftist literary establishment had long been critical of Xu Xu’s fictional output. In 1938, the influential Marxist critic Ba Ren 巴人, the pen name of Wang Renshu 王任叔 (1901−72), had called Xu Xu’s fiction “a bomb full of poison,” capable of “extinguishing the fighting spirit of thousands of revolutionaries” (Wang 1995, 65−67), while in 1945 Shi Huaichi 石懷池 (1925−45?), another leftist critic, had urged readers “not to read Xu Xu’s books anymore […] and to throw them into the cesspool” (Shi 1945, 151−54).3 Once the Communist Party had assumed power in China and established the People’s Republic, it did not take long for Xu Xu to realize that his prewar literary legacy would invariably turn out to be a considerable liability, and he decided to temporarily relocate to Hong Kong.
What both Ba Ren and Shi Huaichi had taken issue with was Xu Xu’s obvious rejection of and opposition to the social-realist mode of narration that the literary left had been promoting in earnest, especially after the founding of the League of Leftist Writers 中國左翼作家聯盟 in 1930. While progressive writers like Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) or critics like Ba Ren believed that literature played an important role in the struggle for social renewal, Xu Xu’s fiction, Shi Huaichi argued, would invariably cause the reader to “distance [oneself] from that cruel struggle between old and new that is currently being carried out all around us […]” and instead “invite [one] to enter an illusionary world” (Shi 1945, 153).
Xu Xu would not have disagreed with the charge. In fact, he had frequently displayed his overt preference for the aesthetic value of illusion over realist methods in his fiction. In “The Goddess of the Arabian Sea,” for example, the protagonist who falls in love with a mysterious woman on board a steamer to Europe at one point declares, “I want to pursue all artistic fantasies, because their beauty to me is reality,” and then announces that “in this world there are people who pursue dreams of the real 求真實的夢, while I seek out the real within dreams 求夢的真實” (Xu 2008, 5:219).
Xu Xu’s insistence on the artistic value of illusions resonates with Bergsonian concepts of intuition that he had become interested in while studying at Peking University in the late 1920s (Green 2011: 89−90). Henri Bergson (1859−1941), a philosopher who himself is considered an heir to the romantic movement and who had a major impact on European modernists such as Proust, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot, appealed to the artist to seek for truths and realities beyond the purely mimetic. Like Schelling before him, who saw in the aesthetic act the highest act of reason, Bergson believed that the artist had an intuitive ability to enter into immediate communication with an object, with nature, and with the self.
The belief in art’s ability to grant access to truths and realities defiant of scientific reason and customarily hidden by our everyday experiences greatly appealed to Xu Xu, and he frequently explored it in his fiction. In his 1947 short story “Hallucination” 幻覺, for example, the story’s narrator meets a painter who, whenever he gazes at one of his small oil paintings, is able to access his own past and temporarily relive the happiness he knew with his now deceased lover. He further claims to briefly unite with her once a day when she appears as an apparition at sunrise, and he proclaims to the incredulous narrator that “illusions and reality are very difficult to tell apart, for reality may consist of the common illusions of the majority, while an illusion can be one person’zs reality” (Xu 2008, 5:72).
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The question of what constituted the appropriate way to depict reality remained a highly contested topic in the newly founded PRC. While progressive Chinese writers of the 1920s and 1930s had embraced literary realism that was largely inspired by the works of Dostoevsky, Zola, and Dickens and that was concerned with making visible the societal deficiencies of Republican-period China, Soviet-style socialist realism eventually became the only officially sanctioned art form in the PRC. Declared the new artistic orthodoxy by Mao Zedong in his famous 1942 speech at the Yan’an Forum for Literature and Arts, socialist realism had been introduced to China a few years earlier by the Marxist critic Zhou Yang 周揚 (1908−89), who in 1936 had laid the theoretical foundation for its implementation in his essay “Thoughts on Realism” 現實主義試論. Pointing out the indisputable correlation between political art and political doctrine, Zhou Yang stated that the
[n]ew realist methods must be based on a correct modern worldview. A correct worldview can guarantee true understanding of the laws of social development […]; it can also greatly enhance the ideological force of artistic creation. (Zhou 1996, 339)
Even in his Hong Kong exile, Xu Xu remained invested in the question of what constituted the appropriate artistic approach to depicting reality. At the same time, he was highly critical of the politicization of literature and art in the PRC and frequently commented on the new literary climate that prevailed in China. In an essay from 1954 entitled “Some Thoughts on Realism” 從寫實主義談起, Xu Xu writes that realism in the West originally had come about in the nineteenth century as a reaction to romanticism and that it corresponded to the rise of positivism and materialism in philosophy (Xu 2008, 10:145). Its prominence in the arts began to wane, Xu Xu continues, in the late nineteenth century with the onset of modern psychology, especially Freudianism, which in philosophy gave rise to a new interest in idealism. To Xu Xu, the various contemporary artistic currents, such as “surrealism, symbolism, neo-romanticism, and existentialism all came about as a reaction to realism” because “humans have a desire for their own minds to explore dreams and illusions in order to obtain a deeper understanding of reality” (Xu 2008, 10:145). This is because “among the totality of reality a person can grasp, there is nothing like the reality that can be engaged with in one’s mind. Even the external world examined by an individual is nothing but the impressions and experiences that exist in one individual’s mind” (Xu 2008, 10:145).
Xu Xu then points out that in the Soviet Union and the countries behind the Iron Curtain, realism in the form of “new realism” 新現實主義 or “scientific realism” 科學現實主義 has become inseparable from politics, because it is now meant to reflect political reality and to promote politics. However, for Xu Xu, “the mission of literature and art lies beyond the realm of politics” (Xu 2008, 10:147). He personally has nothing against individuals who choose “to
walk the old road of realism” 走寫實主義的舊路, Xu Xu concludes, it is just that “I personally feel that realism cannot satisfy me” (Xu 2008, 10:147).
While Xu Xu’s criticism in “Some Thoughts on Realism” was clearly aimed at the state of literature in mainland China, it is important to note that Xu Xu was equally critical of the politicization of literature in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Anti-Communism, whether aimed at the PRC or at the Soviet Union, as Michelle Yeh reminds us, was a major component of postwar cultural policy in the Taiwan of Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887−1975) (Yeh 2007, 120). Hong Kong, on the other hand, had been given an important role in America’s campaign of psychological warfare against the PRC. The United States Information Service (USIS) in Hong Kong came to sponsor a great deal of literature—known as Greenback Culture 綠背文化—that denounced the new regime. Lu Yishi 路易士 was a prominent writer and poet who frequently wrote for journals supported by the USIS, and Eileen Zhang 張愛玲 wrote her novel The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) about the land reform in Communist China under their commission.4
Xu Xu had left Shanghai in 1950 for political reasons, and he remained an outspoken critic of the CCP’s cultural policies throughout his exile in Hong Kong. However, his indictment of the promotion of anti-Communist propaganda in both Taiwan and Hong Kong was equally scathing. In an essay from 1955 he wrote that
[m]uch of Taiwan’s literature is anti-Communist 反共, but in an immature way. In fact, there is likewise a lot of anti-Communist literature from Hong Kong and South Asia, but it is all equally lacking and immature. And what makes an intelligent person feel astonished is that the more this literature gets promoted the worse it gets and the more it resembles the conceptualized and formalized literature of the mainland. (Xu 1991, 275)
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Free from the limitations of state-prescribed socialist realism in the PRC or the proto-fascist policies toward artistic expression of the KMT in Taiwan, Xu Xu in his early Hong Kong fiction continued to engage with Bergsonian phenomenology while also exploring new topical and aesthetic concerns. His short story “Bird Talk,” written shortly after he arrived in Hong Kong and serialized in the literary supplement of the Sing Tao Evening Post 星島晚報, perfectly embodies his aesthetic vision from those years. The narrator of “Bird Talk” is similar to the first-person narrators who populated much of his prewar fiction in that he shares elements of Xu Xu’s biography and narrates a personal experience that largely defies rational explanation. The setting of the story in prewar rural China and Shanghai and the exploration of nostalgia and homelessness, on the other hand, would become the hallmark of Xu Xu’s fictional oeuvre from Hong Kong.
“Bird Talk” opens with the narrator receiving a worn copy of the Diamond Sutra and a letter that informs him of the death of a certain nun named Juening 覺寧 (Peaceful Awareness). The letter greatly saddens the narrator and evokes in him memories of China from before his exile in Hong Kong.
It is the account of these memories that is narrated as a long flashback and constitutes the main body of “Bird Talk.” Once the flashback gets under way the reader learns that because the narrator is suffering from a bout of depression he had decided to leave Shanghai temporarily to convalesce in the countryside. While staying with his grandmother in his ancestral village, he encounters Yunqian, a shy and introverted young woman whose autistic features cause the villagers to slight her. The narrator, however, is drawn to her mysterious charm, especially after he witnesses one morning that she appears to be able to communicate with birds:
It was a hazy morning. The sky was colorless except for a faint red glow in the east. Soon, the birds in the bamboo thicket started to sing. […] Just then, I heard a response from beyond the fence and I caught sight of the girl, wearing a gray dress, her hair done up in two braids. A chorus of birds began chirping from inside the bamboo thicket. […] The girl raised her head. Her face was round, and her eyes shone brightly. She bore a happy smile. The sounds she was making were beautiful. They neither sounded like the trilling of birds, nor did they sound like singing. The girl and the two birds seemed like old acquaintances. (Xu 2008, 6:375)
Intrigued by her unusual talent, the narrator offers to school Yunqian in math and Chinese, hoping that she might teach him bird talk in return. Yunqian, however, is just as unreceptive to modern schooling as the narrator is incapable of learning bird talk. However, when one day she happens to come across a poem the narrator had written the previous day, she expresses an instant liking for it, and the narrator realizes that despite her limited literacy, she is highly susceptible to poetry. The two start to read Tang poetry, the meaning and beauty of which Yunqian seems to grasp intuitively. When the narrator has to return to Shanghai, he decides to take Yunqian with him. However, in the bustling modern city, she is deeply unhappy and reverts to her shy and introverted self. When she eventually begs the narrator to let her return home, he decides to abandon his own life in the city and to live with Yunqian in the countryside. On their way back to their ancestral village where they plan to get married, they overnight in a small nunnery. In the nunnery, Yunqian is introduced to the Diamond Sutra and displays the same intuitive understanding as when she had first encountered poetry. This then prompts the narrator to leave her in the nunnery and return to Shanghai alone:
I knew well that Yunqian was detached from such yearnings and that she was of a nobler kind. She did not belong with me; she belonged in a world unspoiled by worldly matters. Only in such a world could her sublimity and magnificence manifest itself. Only in such a world could she truly feel at ease and be happy. (Xu 2008, 6:405)
Back in Shanghai, the narrator leads a meaningless life full of sin and regret until, years later, he “eventually drifted to Hong Kong” (Xu 2008, 6:406). It is here where he receives the news of the passing of Yunqian, who had changed her name to Juening after her ordination. The novel ends with a line from the Diamond Sutra, read out under tears by the narrator: “All sentient beings […] will eventually be led by me to enter Nirvana where all their anguish will be extinguished” (Xu 2008, 6:407).
“Bird Talk” epitomizes Xu Xu’s view of the function and role of art in society. Yunqian has an intuitive ability to appreciate art and Buddhist sutras in a sensually cognitive way that enlarges her consciousness. In addition, her unusual gift to communicate with birds makes her part of the sublime spheres of nature and the universe. It was access to such spheres that romantics like Schelling (and Bergson a century later) believed the genuine work of art might enable. Xu Xu, in what reads like a genuine act of romantic irony, at first reverses this process in that Yunqian, who already possesses a transcendental self-consciousness because of her ability to communicate with birds, gains access to the conventional world of man—of education and socialization—by way of the very means that are thought to transport man away from normality: art, or, in this case, poetry. Xu Xu’s use of irony here reminds us of Lu Xun’s novella The Diary of a Madman 狂人日記 (1918). It is only in what appears to society as a state of mental confusion or madness that the protagonist is able to gain true understanding of the cannibalistic and self-destructive nature of China’s society.
Yet Xu Xu’s use of irony differs from that of Lu Xun in a fundamental way. While Lu Xun clearly laments China’s national deficiency, the root of which he sees planted in centuries of Confucian socialization, Xu Xu’s lament is that of modern man, indicting not Chinese society, or society at large, but modern man’s inability to be one with nature and to see beyond the scientifically proven and socially accepted. Lu Xun is not nostalgic. On the contrary, his plea to “save the children” at the end of his novel is clearly directed toward a utopian future.
Xu Xu’s quote from the Diamond Sutra also terminates “Bird Talk” on a utopian note. Yet while Yunqian, as the reader is made to infer, might have reached nirvana, the narrator, who through her gained a glimpse of its attainability, remains behind in Hong Kong, a city he now reluctantly calls home. Only when he leaves the city and vent
ures into the mountains (presumably the then still largely undeveloped New Territories) is his mind transported back to a lost paradise that is no less utopian:
Every time I travel to the countryside and gaze at the mountains and streams and the lush forests, and I hear the distant singing of birds, the figure of Yunqian flashes into my memory. (Xu 2008, 6:406)
The Hong Kong scholar Wang Pu has described Xu Xu’s fictional reminiscences and his celebration of the pastoral beauty of his childhood home that we see in “Bird Talk” and several other of his Hong Kong stories as the expression of his nostalgia for his lost home, or, as she puts it, the “elegiac mourning for a pastoral of former days” 田園牧歌式往日的傷悼 (Wang 2003, 101). Another example of this can be found in Xu Xu’s short story “Elopement” 私奔 (1951, translated as “Sister Tsui-ling” by George Kao 喬志高 [1912−2008]) that consists of a first-person narrator’s reminiscences of his childhood in Fengyang village, an idyllic place where he used to roam the fields with his friends, had a childhood crush on the lovable and beautiful Cuiling, and was saved from a drifting sampan by the heroic Zhiming. It is with Zhiming that Cuiling eventually eloped, to avoid an arranged marriage, a plan that she only shared with the narrator, whom she called her little brother. Cuiling and Zhiming eventually end up in Shanghai where the narrator meets them one day several years later, only to notice to his great dismay that the idols of his youth had become frighteningly ordinary members of the urban bourgeoisie. “All the beautiful images which had projected themselves in my child’s mind,” he soberly concludes, “disappeared in the face of reality” (Xu 1974, 113).
Both “Bird Talk” and “Elopement” clearly idealize rural China of the Republican era and are expressions of the kind of nostalgia for a bygone era and a lost home that characterizes much of Hong Kong postwar fiction by émigré writers. At the same time, both stories embody a kind of nostalgia that Michael Löwy believes to be at the center of all romantic nostalgia, namely the nostalgia or longing for an idealized pre-capitalist past where the past becomes the locus onto which the narrator’s longing is directed, a homeland to which Schlegel’s exiled soul could return but which in its pastoral beauty might never have existed in the first place. Löwy argues that
